This is a problem that crept into comics as a serial medium almost from the beginning, albeit very gradually – part of it is that IP is both potentially incredibly valuable and difficult to come up with on a monthly basis with consistent quality. Even for the best artists and writers, “villains of the month” vary enormously, and you can really tell when someone was scrambling to meet deadline and out of ideas so started looking around their desk for inspiration:

So rather than trying to knock it out of the park every month with a new villain, it’s a lot easier to have tried-and-true villains become recurring features, where the artist and writer can elaborate on proven concepts. The same phenomenon also happens on the hero side, especially in team books, where you have a much larger cast of characters. (I do not envy the people working on Legion of Super-Heroes, for ex.)

This intersects with changing trends in comics in weird ways. So first you have the emergence of the Comics Code Authority in the 50s, which among other things tones down on the violence rather substantially (Batman had already stopped killing people before it came into effect) so that killing characters becomes difficult for a long time, which in turn brings up this long-term tension as to why (if recurring villains keep escaping prison) heroes aren’t doing something more final. Then in the 80s and 90s, the aging of the first generation of comics fans and the desire by creators to prove that their medium wasn’t just for kids leads to people reaching for character death as a way to prove maturity…but the underlying dynamic is still there, so there’s inevitable pressure to bring characters back, which eventually gives rise to the revolving door of death, which desensitizes fans, and then you have an arms race towards grimdark as you need to find new sources of shock (DC for some reason went big into arms being cut off for the longest time). 

One person who tried like hell to fight this and ultimately lost was Chris Claremont, who believes to this day that you have to let characters age and change and eventually end, because otherwise they’re not real people. Claremont wanted to replace the old model with one in which characters would die permanently (like Jean Grey) or quit being superheroes to start their own families (like Scott Summers). And when the status quo pushed back against what he was doing, you got real damage to the characters.

So yeah, I think it’s a real problem, but not one without solutions. 

One solution, which has become more common in the post-Image era where there’s a lot more creator-owned stuff, is to give creators the freedom to write beginnings, middles, and ends, because their control over the rights means that you don’t get IP-thirsty companies like DC and Marvel messing with good stories by doing things like having Watchmen prequels, sequels, and crossovers, or killing off and then resurrecting almost every damn hero out there. 

Another solution, and this is one that I haven’t seen used as much, is to step away from strict chronological continuity and adopt instead what I’m going to call the Cimmerian Approach:

“Know, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars – Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyberborea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom of the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west. Hither came Conan the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet.”

Pulp magazines, as the direct ancestors of comic books, were also a serial medium in need of constant content that hit the same problem. And I think R.E Howard came up with a rather brilliant solution by telling the stories out of order. Conan’s story has a beginning, middle, and end as the first passage in “The Phoenix on the Sword” above indicates: he starts out as a barbarian who comes to the civilized kingdoms of the Hyborean Age, and he ends up King of Aquilonia as he is in “Phoenix.” But after that first story (actually the first to be published, he wrote “The Frost Giant’s Daughter” at the same time, but it was rejected) and “The Scarlet Citadel,” he went back and wrote “The Tower of the Elephant,” which depicts Conan as a young thief who’s only very recently come to the civilized kingdoms. And thereafter, Howard bounced around all over the place: Conan is in one story as a mercenary general, then a refugee from a different, defeated army, then a pirate captain, then an imprisoned thief, and so on and so forth. 

What I like about this approach is that it allows you to do the natural human lifecycle/beginning-middle-end that Claremont tried to establish, while also allowing you to produce infinite content by inserting new incidents into earlier periods of their life.